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The affs narrative of technological salvation from the rock guarantees uncheckedspace militarization

Felicity Mellor 7, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Colliding Worlds:Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space, Social Studies of Science 37: 499,http://sss.sagepub.com/content/37/4/499.full.pdf

Since the late 1980s, a small group of astronomers and planetary scientists has repeatedly warned of thethreat of an asteroid impacting with Earth and causing global destruction. They foretell a large impactcausing global fires, the failure of the worlds agriculture and the end of human civilization. But, thesescientists assure us, we live at a unique moment in history when we have the technological means toavert disaster. They call for support for dedicated astronomical surveys of near-Earth objects to provideearly warning of an impactor and they have regularly met with defence scientists to discuss newtechnologies to deflect any incoming asteroids. The scientists who have promoted the asteroid impactthreat have done so by invoking narratives of technological salvation stories which, like the StrategicDefense Initiative (SDI), promise security through a superweapon in space. The asteroid impact threatcan therefore be located within the broader cultural history of fantasies about security and power, which,Bruce Franklin (1988) has argued, is inextricably linked to the century-old idea that a new superweaponcould deliver world peace. Howard McCurdy (1997: 7882), in his study of the ways in which the USspace programme was shaped by popular culture, has suggested that the promotion of the impact threatcan be seen as the completion of Cold War fantasies, which had used a politics of fear to justify spaceexploration. McCurdy highlights the alignment between the promotion of the impact threat and works offiction. In this paper, I consider the reconceptualization of asteroid science that this alignment entailed. Itis beyond the scope of this paper to give a complete history of the science of planetary impacts. My focusis on how a group of scientists moved from seeing impacts as significant events in Earth history to seeingthem as threatening events in the human future a move from historical to futurological narratives. Nor isthere space to give a full account of the empirical developments that were used to support the construalof asteroids as a threat. Rather, I wish to make the case that these empirical developments were givenmeaning within a specific narrative context which drew civilian astronomers into contact with defencescientists, especially those working on SDI. A number of studies (for example, McDougall, 1985; Forman,

1987; Kevles, 1990; DeVorkin, 1992; Leslie, 1993; Dennis, 1994) have revealed the ways in which USresearch programmes and nominally-civilian scientific institutions originated in military programmes.1 Oneaim of this paper is to demonstrate how the boundary between civilian and military science is blurred not

just institutionally, but also at a fundamental conceptual level. The civilian scientists discussed herefollowed different working practices and traded in different forms of expertise than did the defencescientists. They were typically astronomers or planetary scientists who worked for NASA or on NASA-funded research programmes at universities and private institutes. They saw themselves as distinct fromthe defence scientists who were typically physicists and engineers working on new weapons systems orother technologies of national security at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratoriesor at armed services institutions. 2 Yet the two groups came to share an interest in asteroids and with thata set of assumptions about the nature of human society, the role of technology and our place in outerspace. As they came into contact, their differing backgrounds meant they disagreed over a number ofissues, yet both sides pursued the collaboration despite the tensions. Many studies of the interaction

between military and civilian science have focused on sources of funding and shared technologies.3Important as these are, they fail to capture fully the dynamic between the two communities. In particular, acynical picture of scientists simply pursuing sources of funding on any terms cannot reveal the far-reaching ways in which civilian research can become entrenched in particular patterns of thinking whichare supportive of militaristic programmes. For military/civilian collaborations to be sustained, civilianscientists need to share with their counterparts in the defence sector an understanding of the overalltrajectory of their research. For shared technologies to be developed, they need first to be imagined.Military/civilian interactions are therefore predicated on, and mediated through, a shared technoscientificimaginary. Despite expressing concerns about the motives and methods of the weapons scientists, thecivilian scientists who promoted the asteroid impact threat drew on narratives that configured a humanrole in space in a similar way to SDI. These narratives helped make asteroids conceivable as a threat, yetthey also served to make acceptable, and even necessary, the idea of space-based weaponry. Despite

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possibility of retaliation. Imagine what impact these weapons would have on U.S. foreign policy withrespect to two of its most pressing objectives at this point in time. Consider, for one, how useful suchweapons might be with respect to preventing a rival state such as Iran or North Korea from acquiringnuclear weapons. While there has been speculation that the U.S. or Israel may launch air strikes againstpotential nuclear weapons manufacturing facilities in these countries, the logisticsgetting access to

airspace from neighboring countries, and the possibility of retaliation against military forces in the areamake such operations difficult to carry out. Using weapons in space to conduct such missions wouldavoid these logistical difficulties, thereby making them easier (and presumably more likely). The threat ofusing space weapons on either the manufacturing sites of weapons of mass destruction or on the politicalleadership of an adversary in most cases probably would be sufficient to alter the behaviour ofgovernments. In short, if the U.S. were to deploy such weapons in space, they would likely be used tomuch the same effect as the gunboat diplomacy of the 19th century. A second contemporary policyobjective is to fight specific non-state actors. The 9/11 Commission Report discussed in great detail thelogistical obstacles that prevented the Clinton administration from capturing or killing Osama BinLaden.72 The primary obstacle was the difficulty in either launching cruise missiles into Afghanistanthrough another states airspace or deploying U.S. Special Forces in an area so remote from U.S. militarybases. Again, had the U.S. had space-based weapons at the time, they probably would have been theweapons of choice. When combined with intelligence about the location of a potential target, they couldbe used to kill that target on very short notice without violating the air space of other states, or needing tohave a military base nearby to offer a support role. In effect, any person or group of people anywhere onEarth could be targeted on very short notice, thereby constituting everyone everywhere as objects of theglobal sovereign. All would be subject to the rule of the U.S. state. The sovereignty of states would nolonger be an obstacle to killing enemies, and these assassinations could be carried out rather easilywithout the threat of retaliation by the state whose sovereignty has been violated. The example of usingspace weapons to target non-state actors such as Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda points to a thirdconstitutive effect of space weapons. Because these weapons could target anyone, anywhere, atanytime, everyone on the Earth is effectively reduced to bare life.73 As Agamben demonstrates inHomo Sacer (1998), one of the constitutive powers of the sovereign is to determine who is outside thelaws and protections of the state. While human rights regimes and the rule of law may exist under a late-modern global empire policed by space weapons,74 the global sovereign will have the ability to decidethe exception to this rule of law, and this state of exception in many cases may be exercised by the use ofspace weapons that constituted this sovereign in the first place.

Alternative: ______________________________

Reject the affs politics of fear to fragment the ideology of asteroid paranoiaFelicity Mellor 7, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Colliding Worlds:

Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space, Social Studies of Science 37: 499,http://sss.sagepub.com/content/37/4/499.full.pdf

But the focus on narrative also begs a question: Which stories would we prefer to frame our science?Should science be driven by fear or by curiosity? Should it be aimed at creating technologies of war orcultures of compassion? These are normative questions, but they are also precisely the questions thatmake the military influence on science such an important issue. Narratives are inherently ideological anda refusal to see them as such does no more to enhance the scholars objectivity than it does thescientists. The stories told by the asteroid scientists led them into collaborations with weapons scientistsand helped fuel a discourse of fear that served a particular ideological purpose. This should be bothrecognized and challenged, not for the sake of regaining some impossible ideal of an undistorted sciencebut because there are other stories, based on different ideological assumptions, that we could tell in orderto guide science towards more peaceful ends.

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2NC LINK SURVEILLANCE

Surveillance transforms space into a geostrategic arena to be weaponizedFelicity Mellor 7, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Colliding Worlds:


In contrast to traditional astronomical systems, which passively watched the skies, asteroid detectionsystems were to be surveillance systems that actively hunted the skies for objects of human import. TheSpaceguard Survey was predicated on a will to action in a way in which the earlier Spacewatch Surveywas not. Similarly, when it fired its impactor at Comet Tempel 1, NASAs Deep Impact mission took a farmore active intervention in space than did earlier generations of probes. This was not far from EdwardTellers call for experimentation with near-Earth objects to test defence technologies (Tedeschi & Teller,1994; Teller, 1995), an idea dismissed at the time as extreme by some civilian scientists (Chapman,1998). Likewise, one of the recommendations of the 2004 Planetary Defense Conference was thatdeflection techniques should be demonstrated on an actual asteroid (Ailor, 2004: 5).28 Thetechnologization of space promoted in both the fictional works and the scientists technical proposals, alsoformed an integral part of the imagery and rhetoric that surrounded SDI, as its detractors highlighted

when they re-named the project Star Wars. SDI was always premised on a vision of space as atechnologized theatre of war. In the hands of a technoenthusiast such as Edward Teller, SDI wasconfigured as a space-based technological extravaganza with few limits.29 In SDI, as in asteroid researchand science fiction, space became a dynamic arena through which our technologies would move, inwhich our weapons would be placed, and across which our wars were to be waged.30 As discussed inthe introduction to this paper, narrative is an inherently teleological form. In conventional narratives, theaction is moved towards closure by the heroes of the story. In the impact narratives, the heroes aretechnological heroes set the task of saving the world. By drawing on these narratives and following thecall for human agency inherent in the narrative structure, the scientists implicitly accepted this role as anecessary one. Having shifted apocalypse from the realm of nuclear politics to that of natural science, theimpact-threat scientists were able to position themselves as heroes whose combined far-sightedness andtechnological know-how would save us all. Emphasizing the role of the unacknowledged hero in aforeword to a volume of conference proceedings, astronomer Tom Gehrels (2002: xiii) claimed: There is

a beauty also in hazards, because we are taking care of them. We are working to safeguard our planet,even if the world does not seem to want to be saved. In a paper in another volume of conferenceproceedings, astrophysicist Eugene Levy was even more explicit about the scientists expanded role: Inthe arms race, the motivating dynamic was a political one. A dynamic in which scientists and engineersprovided the technical tools, but, as a group, brought no special and unique wisdom to the table in making

judgements about what to do. In the present case, the dynamic is different. The adversary is not anothernation; the calculus is not one of political fears, anxieties, and motivations, for which we scientists have nospecial expertise. Rather the adversary is the physical world. In assessing this adversary, we scientistshave special and unique expertise. (Levy, 1994: 7; italics in original) Eclipsing the political dimension ofthe impact threat with their appeals to the natural, the scientists appropriated for themselves a heroic role.This technological hero was a moral hero he would warn us of the danger and save us despiteourselves. Thus the scientists frequently quoted Representative George Browns opening statement to aCongressional hearing when he warned that if we were to do nothing about the impact threat, it would be

the greatest abdication in all of human history not to use our gift of rational intellect and conscience toshepherd our own survival and that of all life on Earth.31 Through such claims, the issue of planetarydefence became a moral frame through which other threats of more human origin could also beaddressed. Increased knowledge and surveillance of asteroids, the scientists insisted, would help stopmistakes by the military decision-makers by preventing the misidentification of asteroid airbursts asenemy nuclear warheads (Chapman & Morrison, 1994: 39). At the same time, destroying asteroids wouldprovide us with a way of using up those unwanted bombs. As John Lewis (1997: 215) put it: The netresult of the asteroid deflection is really a twofold benefit to Earth: a devastating impact would be avoidedand there would be one less nuclear warhead on Earth. Similarly, Duncan Steel saw the use of SDItechnologies in asteroid missions such as Clementine II as a prime example of beating swords intoploughshares (quoted in Matthews, 1997). Furthermore, the international tensions that led to theproliferation of nuclear weapons in the first place, would also be resolved by uniting against the commonenemy of the asteroid. Thus Carl Sagan and Steve Ostro, although largely critical of the promotion of the

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impact threat, suggested that: In an indirect way the threat of interplanetary collision may have a politicalsilver lining. They represent a common enemy to all nations and ethnic groups. By posing two differentclasses of danger to the human species, one natural and the other of our own making, Earth-approachingobjects may provide a new and potent motivation for maturing international relations, ultimately helping tounify the human species. (Sagan & Ostro, 1994b: 72; see also Gehrels, 1988: 303) Even for Sagan and

Ostro, then, as for the other civilian scientists, the impact threat offered hope of salvation.

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2NC LINK SELF FULFILLING PROPHECY

Framing is key narratives of technological salvation necessitate militarizationFelicity Mellor 7, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Colliding Worlds:


Over the past 20 years a small group of astronomers and planetary scientists has actively promoted theidea that an asteroid might collide with the Earth and destroy civilization. Despite concerns about placingweapons in space, the asteroid scientists repeatedly met with scientists from the Strategic DefenseInitiative to discuss mitigation technologies. This paper examines the narrative context in which asteroidswere constructed as a threat and astronomy was reconfigured as an interventionist science. I argue thatconceptualizing asteroids through narratives of technological salvation invoked a narrative imperativethat drew the astronomers towards the militaristic endings that their stories demanded. Impact-threatscience thus demonstrates both the ways in which scientific research can be framed by fictionalnarratives and the ideological ends that such narratives can serve.

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2NC LINK SELF FULFILLING PROPHECY

The discourse of danger that surrounds asteroids is self-perpetuatingFelicity Mellor 7, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Colliding Worlds:


Even as the scientists themselves attempted to pull back from concrete proposals for weapons systems,their own discourse irresistibly drew them towards the militaristic intervention demanded by the narrativeimperative. The identification of asteroids as a threat required a military response. Astronomer DuncanSteel (2000b), writing about the impact threat in The Guardian newspaper, put it most clearly when hestated that we too need to declare war on the heavens. Just as the overlap between science and sciencefiction was mutually supportive, so the overlap between impact science and defence helped legitimizeboth. The civilian scientists could draw on a repertoire of metaphors and concepts already articulated bythe defence scientists to help make the case for the threat from space. They would no longer be amarginalized and underfunded group of astronomers, but would take on the ultimate role of defending theworld. Similarly, in the context of the impact threat, the defence scientists could further develop theirweapons systems without being accused of threatening the delicate nuclear balance of mutually assured

destruction or, in the period between the fall of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 attacks, of irresponsiblygenerating a climate of fear in the absence of an identifiable enemy.

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2NC FRAMEWORK

Ideology comes first narratives determine the research questions that guidescientific inquiry


Several studies of the role of narrative in the production of scientific knowledge have identified it as ameans of generating coherence in science that both enables and constrains further research (Haraway,1989; OHara, 1992; Rouse, 1996; Brown, 1998). Richard Harvey Brown is the most explicit about whatconstitutes a narrative, defining it as an accounting of events or actions temporally that explains themcausally or motivationally (Brown, 1998: 98). Browns definition of narrative fits with that of narrativetheorists such as Mieke Bal (1997) who have stressed that narrative entails not a random unfolding ofevents but a sequenced ordering involving a transition from one state to another brought about orexperienced by actors. One implication of this is the fundamental role of causality and agency. Another isthat a narrative beginning always anticipates an ending a resolution or closure to the events that havebeen set in motion. Historian Hayden White (1981: 23) has argued that the tendency to present history asnarrative arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closureof an image or life that is and can only be imaginary. He finds that narrative closure involves a passagefrom one moral order to another. Where, in any account of reality, narrativity is present, we can be surethat morality or a moralizing impulse is present too (White, 1981: 22). In this sense, narrative is inherentlyteleological and ideological. The inexorable movement of a narrative towards a predetermined endensures that its many assumptions go unchallenged. An analytical approach to the interaction betweenmilitary and civilian science that recognizes the ideological function of narrative can help sidestep some ofthe difficulties associated with the distortionist thesis often attributed to Paul Formans (1987) landmarkpaper on the military basis of US post-war physics. Forman has been criticized for implying that withoutmilitary patronage, physics would have followed an ideal direction unaffected by outside interests (forexample, Kevles, 1990). By looking at what sorts of narratives scientists draw on, we can avoid Formanssupposed idealism. The question is not so much whether science has been distorted, but through whichof many possible stories a research programme has been articulated. To ask which stories have been

invoked is to ask which ideologies have implicitly been accepted. And to ask that is to allow that, onideological grounds, some stories are preferable to others.

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2NC IMPACT MILITARIZATION

The need for narrative closure ensures that civilian scientists supportweaponization


The construal of asteroids as acting agents, of astronomy as the means to salvation, and of humanintervention in space as a moral cause, were also elements of the stories told in the fictional works. Directreferences to works of science fiction in the writings of the asteroid scientists were therefore just the mostexplicit traces of the asteroid scientists dependence on narratives of technological salvation. Science andscience fiction existed in a mutually reinforcing relationship in which civilian scientists, defence expertsand science fiction writers all narrated the impact threat. As science and fiction became aligned, asteroidsbecame incorporated into the world of narrative cause-and-effect with its movement towards closure. Theasteroid scientists reliance on such narratives meant that they could not avoid the closure demanded bytheir stories they were subject to a narrative imperative. Regardless of their personal feelings aboutweapons in space, they regularly met with defence scientists to discuss weapons technologies to deflector destroy an incoming asteroid, for only this could provide a satisfactory resolution to their impact stories.Despite their suspicions about each others motives, the civilian and defence scientists dependence onsimilar narratives of technological salvation meant that they were both drawn towards the same endings.

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2NC IMPACT DETERRENCE

The discourse of asteroid deflection empirically legitimizes the deployment ofnuclear weapons


Like the impact threat, SDIs technological solution to the stalemate of the Cold War was also embeddedwithin a moral frame of technological salvation. As Spencer Weart (1988: 385, 399) points out in hishistory of nuclear imagery: In promoting the Star Wars program Reagan was apparently working torestore trust by affirming that technology, even weapons technology, could be inherently moral andhumane. Through all this talk [about SDI] ran the idea of salvation by way of technology in theheavens. Appropriating images of nuclear holocaust from the anti-nuclear campaigners, the supporters ofSDI spoke of protective, defensive technologies that would, in Reagans words, render nuclear weaponsimpotent and obsolete (quoted in FitzGerald, 2000: 23). For Reagan, SDI was a moral programme to bepursued by the scientific community for the cause of mankind and world peace. Others in the defencecommunity also spoke of a moral imperative and of protecting the American people rather than avengingthem.32 Mutually assured destruction was to be replaced by mutually assured survival. The moralprogramme of SDI hinged on the notion of defensive weapons to replace offensive ones. At the level ofrhetoric, therefore, SDI helped consolidate the switch from an offensive to a defensive posture. Researchinto the asteroid impact threat celebrated this posture. Impact threat science created an external enemyand deployed the same moral argument of defence-shields-as-salvation as did Reagan and hissupporters. Indeed, Thomas Ahrens went so far as to describe the nuclear weapons that might be used todeflect asteroids as weapons of mass protection (quoted in Lewis, 1997: 221).

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2NC IMPACT BIG SECURITY

Fear of the rock spills over to create a state of permanent warfareFelicity Mellor 7, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Colliding Worlds:


The asteroid impact threat offered a scientifically validated enemy onto which could be projected the fearson which a militaristic culture depends. Far from providing a replacement outlet for weaponstechnologies, the promotion of the asteroid impact threat helped make the idea of war in space moreacceptable and helped justify the continued development of spacebased weaponry. Arguably, with theClementine and Deep Impact missions, the asteroid impact threat even facilitated the testing of SDI-style systems. The asteroid impact threat legitimized a way of talking, and thinking, that was founded onfear of the unknown and the assumption that advanced technology could usher in a safer era. In sodoing, it resonated with the politics of fear and the technologies of permanent war that are now at thecentre of US defence policy.

Security discourse causes apocalypse in the name of survivalPeterCoviello, Asst Prof of English Bowdoin, 1(Queer Frontiers, ed. Boone, authors italics)

Perhaps. But to claim that American culture is at present decisively postnuclear is not to say that theworld we inhabit is in any way post-apocalyptic. Apocalypse, as I began by saying, changed it did not goaway. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear age of yesteryear, apocalypsesignified an event threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derridas suitably menacingphrase) remainderless and a-symbolic destruction,6 then in the postnuclear world apocalypse is anaffair whose parameters are definitively localin shape and in substance, apocalypse is defined now bythe affliction it brings somewhere else, always to an other people whose very presence might then bewritten as a kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and the prosperity of a cherishedgeneral population. This fact seems to me to stand behind Susan Sontags incisive observation, from

1989, that, Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not Apocalypse Now but Apocalypse from NowOn.7 The decisive point here in the perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse (the point Sontag goes on,at length, to miss) is that apocalypse is ever present because, as an element in a vast economy of power,it is ever useful. That is, through the perpetual threat of destruction through the constant reproduction ofthe figure of apocalypse agencies of power ensure their authority to act on and through the bodies of aparticular population. No one turns this point more persuasively than Michel Foucault, who in the finalchapter of his first volume ofThe History of Sexualityaddresses himself to the problem of a power that isless repressive than productive, less life-threatening than, in his words, life-administering. Power, hecontends, exerts a positive influence on life [and] endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it,subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. In his brief comments on what he callsthe atomic situation, however, Foucault insists as well that the productiveness of modern power mustnot be mistaken for a uniform repudiation of violent or even lethal means. For as managers of life andsurvival, of bodies and the race, agencies of modern power presume to act on the behalf of theexistence of everyone. Whatsoever might be construed as a threat to life and survival serves to authorize

any expression of force, no matter how invasive or, indeed, potentially annihilating. If genocide is indeedthe dream of modern power, Foucault writes, this is not because of a recent return to the ancient right tokill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.8 For a state that would arm itself not with the power to kill its population,but with a more comprehensive power over the patterns and functioning of its collective life, the threat ofan apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can scarcely be done without.

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ALT CRITICAL GEOGRAPHY

Reject their dangerous notions of a simplified Other and attempts to map outspace

FraserMacDonald 7, School of Anthro, Geography, and Envtl Studies Melbourne (Progress inHuman Geography 31.5, p. 592-615, Anti-Astropolitik)

(1) Astrography and astropolitics, like geography and geopolitics, constitute a political domination andcultural imagining of space ( Tuathail, 1996: 28). While commentators like Colin Gray have posited aninescapable geography (eg, of course, physical geography is politically neutral), a critical agendaconceives of geography not as a fixed substratum but as a highly social form of knowledge (Gray, 1999:173; Tuathail, 1999: 109). For geography, read astrography. We must be alert to the declarative (thisis how the Outer Earth is) and imperative (this is what we must do) modes of narration that astropoliticshas borrowed from its terrestrial antecedent ( Tuathail, 1999: 107). The models of Mackinder andMahan that are so often applied to the space environment are not unchanging laws; on the contrary theyare themselves highly political attempts to create and sustain particular strategic outcomes in specifichistorical circumstances. (2) Rather than actively supporting the dominant structures and mechanisms ofpower, a critical astropolitics must place the primacy of such forces always already in question. Criticalastropolitics aims to scrutinize the power politics of the expert/ think-tank/tactician as part of a widerproject of deepening public debate and strengthening democratic accountability ( Tuathail, 1999: 108).(3) Mackinders end of geography thesis held that the era of terrestrial exploration and discovery wasover, leaving only the task of consolidating the world order to fi t British interests ( Tuathail, 1996: 27).Dolmans vision of space strategy bears striking similarities. Like Tuathails critique of Mackindersimperial hubris, Astropolitik could be reasonably described as triumphalism blind to its ownprecariousness ( Tuathail, 1996: 28). Dolman, for instance, makes little effort to conceal his tumescentpatriotism, observing that the United States is awash with power after its impressive victories in the 1991Gulf War and 1999 Kosovo campaign, and stands at the forefront of history capable of presiding over thebirth of a bold New World Order. One might argue, however, that Mackinder as the theorist of imperialdecline may in this respect be an appropriate mentor ( Tuathail, 1999: 112). It is important, I think, todemystify Astropolitik: there is nothing inevitable about US dominance in space, even if the USA were topursue this imperial logic. (4) Again like Mackinder, Astropolitik mobilizes an unquestioned ethnocentrism.

Implicit in this ideology is the notion that America must beat China into space because they are not likeus. The most ruthlessly suitable candidates for space dominance, we are told the most capablyendowed are like those who populated America and Australia (Dolman, 2002: 27). (5) A criticalastropolitics must challenge the mythic properties of Astropolitik and disrupt its reverie for the timelessinsights of the so-called geopolitical masters. For Tuathail, geopolitics is mythic because it promisesuncanny clarity in a complex world and is fetishistically concerned with . prophecy ( Tuathail,1999: 113). Tuathails critical project, by contrast, seeks to recover the political and historical contextsthrough which the knowledge of Mackinder and Mahan has become formalized. V Conclusion StephenGraham, following Eyal Weizmann, has argued that geopolitics is a flat discourse (Weizmann, 2002;Graham, 2004: 12). It attends to the cartographic horizontality of terrain rather than a verticality that cutsthrough the urban landscape from the advantage of orbital supremacy. Just as, for Graham, a criticalgeopolitics must urgently consider this new axis in order to challenge the practices and assumptions ofurbicide, so too I would argue it must lift its gaze to the politics of the overhead. Our interest in the

vertical plane must extend beyond terrestrial perspectives; we must come to terms with the everydayrealities of space exploration and domination as urgent subjects of critical geographical inquiry. Aprerequisite for this agenda is to overcome our sense of the absurdity and oddity of space, anambivalence that has not served human geography well. The most obvious entry point is to thinksystematically about some of the more concrete expressions of outer space in the making of Earthlygeographies. For instance, many of the high-profi le critical commentaries on the recent war in Iraq, eventhose written from geographical perspectives, have been slow to address the orbital aspects of militarysupremacy (see, for instance, Harvey, 2003; Gregory, 2004; Retort, 2005). Suffice to say that, in war as inpeace, space matters on the ground, if indeed the terrestrial and the celestial can be sensibly individuatedin this way. There is also, I think, scope for a wider agenda on the translation of particular Earthlyhistorical geographies into space, just as there was a translation of early occidental geographies ontoimperial spaces. When Donald Rumsfeld talks of a Space Pearl Harbor, there is plainly a particular set ofhistoricogeographical imaginaries at work that give precedence, in this case, to American experience.

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Rumsfeld has not been slow to invoke Pearl Harbor, most famously in the aftermath of 11 September2001; notably, in all these examples Hawaii in 1941; New York in 2001; and the contemporary spacerace there lurks the suggestion of a threat from the East.9 All of this is a reminder that the colonizationof space, rather than being a decisive and transcendent break from the past, is merely an extension oflong-standing regimes of power. As Peter Redfield succinctly observed, to move into space is a form of

return: it represents a passage forward through the very pasts we might think we are leaving behind(Redfield, 2002: 814). This line of argument supports the idea that space is part and parcel of the Earthsgeography (Cosgrove, 2004: 222). We can conceive of the human geography of space as being, in thewords of Doreen Massey, the sum of relations, connections, embodiments and practices (Massey, 2005:8). She goes on to say that these things are utterly everyday and grounded, at the same time as theymay, when linked together, go around the world. To this we might add that they go around and beyondthe world. The space of space is both terrestrial and extraterrestrial: it is the relation of the Earth to itsfirmament. Lisa Parks and Ursula Biemann have described our relationship with orbits as being aboutuplinking and downlinking, [the] translation [of] signals, making exchanges with others and positioning theself (Parks and Biemann, 2003). It is precisely this relational conception of space that might helpfullyanimate a revised geographical understanding of the Outer Earth. As has already been made clear, thissort of project is by no means new. Just as astropolitics situates itself within a Mackinderian geographicaltradition, so a critical geography of outer space can draw on geographys earlymodern cosmographicalorigins, as well as on more recent emancipatory perspectives that might interrogate the workings of race,class, gender and imperialism. Space is already being produced in and through Earthly regimes of powerin ways that undoubtedly threaten social justice and democracy. A critical geography of space, then, isnot some far-fetched or indulgent distraction from the real world; rather, as critical geographers we needto think about the contest for outer space as being constitutive of numerous familiar operations, not onlyin respect of international relations and the conduct of war, but also to the basic infrastructuralmaintenance of the state and to the lives of its citizenry.

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A2 THREAT = REAL

Turn reliance on salvation narratives corrupts scientists objectivity and causesresearchers to construct asteroids as existential threats


During the 1980s and 1990s, a small group of planetary scientists and astronomers set about activelypromoting the asteroid impact threat. They drew on an expanded empirical base, but also on narratives oftechnological salvation. Despite their concerns that their warnings were greeted by a giggle factor andthat funding remained too low, they succeeded in capturing the attention of the media and of some policy-makers and in establishing the impact threat as a legitimate and serious topic for scientific study. By theeve of the new millennium, the meaning of asteroids had undergone a significant transformation.

Asteroids had gone from being distant relics of Solar System history to being a hidden enemy that couldstrike at any time with catastrophic consequences. The reconceptualization of asteroids wasaccompanied by a reconceptualization of both space and astronomy. In Newtonianism, space had beenconceived as an empty geometrical abstraction in which Gods handiwork was displayed to the knowingobserver. Space was both predictable and distant. Now, with the promotion of the impact threat, spacewas configured as the source of an enemy against which we must defend ourselves. This threateningconception of space matched the conception of space as a theatre of war promoted by the supporters ofSDI. Space had become a place, a technologized location for human action where wars could be foughtand human salvation sought. Thus astronomy was also reconceptualized. Further developing the violentmetaphors already appropriated by impactextinction theory (Davis, 2001), astronomers recast their roleas impassioned prophets of doom and saviours of mankind rather than as cold calculators of cosmicorder. Traditionally, Solar System astronomy had dealt with the grand narratives of planetary history andthe timeless certainties of celestial dynamics. The technologies of astronomy telescopes and, later,space probes were the tools through which new knowledge had been sought. They were not, on thewhole, instruments of action. Now, however, astronomy was to be prophetic and interventionist. Ascomets had been in a far earlier period, both asteroids and comets were now treated as monsters portents of Earthly calamities. It was the purpose of planetary astronomy to watch for these portents.

Equally, it was the duty of astronomers to warn the unsuspecting public and to intervene to save theworld. Planetary astronomy was transformed from the passive observation of the heavens to the activesurveillance of the heavens, and the instruments of astronomy were to be supplemented with thetechnologies of war. By the 1980s and 1990s, asteroid science, defence science and science fiction allpresented space as an arena for technological intervention where an invisible enemy would be defeatedfor the greater good of mankind. Science f iction provided a culturally available resource that could giveconcrete form to the ideas of both asteroid scientists and weapons designers. Through narrative, thetimeless and universal speculations of science could be converted into a specific sequence of events. Bydrawing on narratives of technological salvation, asteroid scientists made their case more compelling, butthey also became dependent on narrative scenarios shared by the defence scientists.

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A2 THREAT = REAL AUTHOR INDICT

Astronomers deliberately manipulate asteroids stats to get research fundingFelicity Mellor 10, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Negotiating

uncertainty: asteroids, risk and the media, Public Understand. Sci. 19(1) (2010) 1633Despite frequently referring to impacts as low frequency/high consequence events, NEO scientists failedto acknowledge that this meant that annual averages were statistically meaningless. 3 Instead, by offeringcomparisons with such things as deaths from car crashes, they implied an equivalence between theimpact risk and other death rates whose averages are statistically valid. When other scientists did criticizeChapman and Morrisons comparisons, they did so by offering alternative comparisonssuch asworldwide death rates from childhood diseases or smoking (Weissman, 1994; Sagan and Ostro, 1994)rather than criticizing the actuarial approach itself.Yet, like the comparison between the Torino scale andthe Richter scale, these risk comparisons compared quantities derived from historical dataevents whichhave actually happenedwith those based on a predicted event (the destruction of human civilization byan asteroid impact) that has never happened. As Chapman and Morrison (1994) admitted, there havenever actually been any authenticated deaths from asteroid impacts. In an e-mail to the CambridgeConference Network in the days after the XF11 affair, astronomer Duncan Steel (1998a) pushed the

manipulation of statistics even further. After bemoaning the publics lack of understanding ofprobabilities and their failure to take seriously impacts which occurred on average once every 50,000 or500,000 years, he reasoned that car accidents, which are taken seriously, had a similar timescale:

Averaged over industrialized nations I believe that the car accident rates indicate a probability of dyingthat way of about one in 120. For the same nations the average life expectancy is about 80 years. Thusthe timescale for dying in a car crash is of order 120 80 ~ 10,000 years. In fact, for the US,approximately 39,000 fatalities in car crashes each year means there is the equivalent of one fatalityevery 13 minutes. This is the most meaningful measure for the timescale of deaths from car crashes.Since the probability of dying already factors in the average life expectancy, Steels figure is actually thetime needed to kill the entire population through car crashes assuming the population to be otherwisestatic.4 The problems associated with the statistical framing of the impact threat mean that it should notbe seen as a cognitive strategy to aid understanding. Rather, like the presumed demarcation betweenscientist and public, it functioned as a discursive strategy to aid the denotation of asteroids as risky and

the positioning of NEO scientists as the appropriate experts to manage the risk. Among other things, thiscould help secure funding for NEO research. Some of the critics of the Torino scale were explicit aboutfunding being the core issue at stake. Astronomer Mark Kidger (1999) worried that with so few objectsregistering on the scale at all, media interest would fall off and the public might assume the problem hadgone away. The truth is that the problem still exists, will not go away, and can only get more serious if areduced public profile of the issue leads to a serious reduction in funding for NEO programs. Hesuggested that to maintain public interest the lower end of the scale should be expanded so that itregistered more objects more frequently. Another commentator, although not himself a NEO researcher,was even more explicit. Jens Kiefer-Olsen (2000) claimed that any impact scale must serve primarily asa vehicle to extract funding from politicians. Hence the scale should produce a one-dimensional figure,namely the amount of $$$ to be allocated immediately, or over a specific period. Brian Marsden (2003a)thought that media exposure had indeed helped secure funds for NEO research and suggested thatwithout the XF11 coverage NASA would have put less money into NEO searches than it now does (yes,

there could yet be more!). Despite the scientists concerns about the quality of media reports on theimpact threat, journalists rarely, if ever, challenged the claims made by the scientists and they acceptedthe statistical framing of the issue which the scientists promoted. Most journalists included statementsabout uncertainty in their news reports, their stories were derived from statements issued by scientificsources and they often quoted relevant experts or institutions. When revised data were released implyinga downgraded risk for a specific asteroid, some news reports presented this as meaning that thescientists had made mistakes but most did not take this angle. Thus journalists were accepting of theNEO scientists claims and were willing to reproduce them in their reports. However, the scientistsattachment of specific numbers and dates to possible impact solutions enabled journalists to frame theirstories in terms of certain knowledge. When later reports presented equally certain, but different,knowledge claims the scientists worried that they would lose credibility. As Clark Chapman (1998b) saidafter the XF11 affair: All of us, not just the MPC [Minor Planet Center], lost some credibility a few weeksago when failures in the peer-review process at the MPC led to the XF11 scare. Others, such as Italian

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astronomer Andrea Milani (1999), worried that delaying an announcement would also damage theresearchers credibility. If the people not belonging to the rather exclusive club of specialists of orbitdetermination get the impression that they are not being informed, on an issue as critical as the orbits ofthe NEO (and their close approaches to the Earth), the credibility of the scientific community as a wholecould be undermined, and this is a more subtle but very dangerous version of the crying wolf story.

Scientists predictions are exaggeratedFelicity Mellor 10, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Negotiatinguncertainty: asteroids, risk and the media, Public Understand. Sci. 19(1) (2010) 1633

Natural scientists often appear in the news media as key actors in the management of risk. This paperexamines the way in which a small group of astronomers and planetary scientists have constructedasteroids as risky objects and have attempted to control the media representation of the issue. It showshow scientists negotiate the uncertainties inherent in claims about distant objects and future events bydrawing on quantitative risk assessments even when these are inapplicable or misleading. Although theasteroid scientists worry that media coverage undermines their authority, journalists typically accept thescientists framing of the issue. The asteroid impact threat reveals the implicit assumptions which canshape natural scientists public discourse and the tensions which arise when scientists quantitative

uncertainty claims are re-presented in the news media.

Your scientists empirically ignore realityFelicity Mellor 7, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Colliding Worlds:


Similarly, astronomer Duncan Steel (1995: 234) recalled that the members of the Detection Committeehad been outraged by a paper presented at the San Juan Capistrano conference by Nicholas Colella, aLawrence Livermore scientist who had called for the development of a multimilliondollar satellite-baseddetection system, and that Lowell Wood had been roundly booed after criticizing NASA space missionsin an afterdinner speech. Steel said that he found the Interception Workshop very interesting andstimulating, but that it was also bizarre in that some of the presentations paid little regard to the laws of

physics and less to any laws of economic reality (Steel, 1995: 232). According to Steel, some of the talkswere wildly in error and David Morrison had complained that the defence scientists lived in a paralleluniverse and that they seemed to draw on science fiction rather than the laws of physics (Steel, 1995:23435). They did indeed draw on science fiction, but, as we will see, so too did the civilian scientists.

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A2 THREAT = REAL MEDIA SPIN

Even if the affs science is correct, their authors claims are sensationalizedFelicity Mellor 10, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Negotiating

uncertainty: asteroids, risk and the media, Public Understand. Sci. 19(1) (2010) 1633Over the past two decades, British newspapers have periodically announced the end of the world. Playfulheadlines such as The End is Nigh and Armageddon Outta Here! are followed a few days later byreports that theres no danger after all: PHEW. The end of the world has been cancelled (Britten, 1998;Wickham, 2002; Evening Standard, 1998). These stories, and others like them appearing in news mediaaround the world, deal with the possibility that an asteroid or comet may one day collide with the Earthcausing global destruction. The threat posed by near-Earth objects (NEOs) has been actively promotedby a group of astronomers and planetary scientists since the late 1980s. Construing asteroids and cometsas risky objects, the NEO scientists have lobbied politicians and written popular books calling fordedicated sky surveys to identify potentially hazardous asteroids. Yet despite their own efforts to draw thepublics attention to the issue, the scientists have worried about the way in which the impact threat isreported in the news media, especially in the UK. After each episode of media coverage, they haveattempted to find new ways of controlling the representation of asteroids as a risk. At the heart of their

concerns has been the question of how they can manage uncertain knowledge about asteroids whilstretaining their authority as scientists. This paper examines the tensions which arise when naturalscientists position themselves in the public arena as experts on risk by looking at the ways in which theNEO scientists have constructed asteroids as a risk, their struggles to control the media representation ofthe issue, and the assumptions on which their evolving communication strategy has been based. Since itwas reports in the UK press which most concerned the scientists, it is on these that this paper focuses.Social theorist Ulrich Beck (2000: xii) has used comet impacts to illustrate how modern society has movedaway from a preoccupation with natural risks: We are no longer talking about comets crashing to earth oraccidents with a greater or lesser degree of probability occurring. In his Risk Society, Beck (1992) arguesthat our current phase of modernization is defined by the replacement of localized, natural hazards withglobal, technological risks. Yet the demarcation between natural and technological risks is not as clear-cutas Beck seems to imply. Debates about the probabilities of natural risks are as characteristic of the risksociety as are controversies about industrial risks. As this paper shows, even astronomers the

scientists whose objects of study are furthest removed from the products of industrialization can beactive participants in the discourses of risk. We are still talking about comets (and asteroids) crashing toEarth, but we are doing so in a new way. Natural risks such as the impact threat are, like industrial risks,constructed through scientific discourses made available through technological developments. The impactthreat has all the characteristics of one of Becks risks of modernization: it is global, unlimited in time,and invisible until made visible by science. Sociologists of science have examined the ways in whichscientists construct and manage risk. Scholars such as Brian Wynne argue that risk is context dependentand that scientific risk assessments constrain discourse by rendering risk the object of quantitativeanalyses and by imposing a strict demarcation of risk from ethics and political values (e.g., Wynne, 2001).The issue of risk is closely related to how uncertainties within scientific knowledge are negotiated.Constructivist analyses of scientific uncertainty argue that uncertainty is not simply an absence ofknowledge or an aspect of underlying reality, but something which is actively constructed and managed(Pinch, 1981; Campbell, 1985; Star, 1985; Stocking and Holstein, 1993; Zehr, 1999). Holly Stocking

(1998: 168), for instance, using the term ignorance to cover uncertainties, errors, absences ofknowledge and other forms of non-knowing, argues that ignorance, like knowledge, is a constructionembedded in diverse social interests and commitments. The authority of science emerges as a key issueshaped by uncertainty claims. Although uncertainty can potentially undermine scientific authority in publicscience settings, it is often used to enhance it (Campbell, 1985; Zehr, 1999). In a study of scientific policyadvisors, Shackley andWynne (1996) find that scientists manage uncertainties flexibly to facilitate theirinteractions with policymakers at the same time as maintaining their authority. Uncertainty can also serveto demarcate science and the public. In a study of policy advice on the risk from mobile phones, Stilgoe(2007) finds that uncertainty and public concerns are co-produced the judgment about what forms ofuncertainty are appropriate also entails a judgment about which, if any, public concerns are relevant. Inthe news media, too, uncertainty can offer a means through which scientific authority can be negotiated.Zehr (2000) finds that uncertainty, constructed through news values such as controversy and novelty,provided a frame for newspaper coverage of global warming. The way in which uncertainty was managed

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served to position scientists as the providers of authoritative knowledge and the public as misinformed.However, journalists and scientists may construct uncertainty in conflicting ways. Stocking (1999) arguesthat scientists often make ignorance claims to support particular actions but that such claims can beappropriated and modified by the news media to serve their, typically different, interests. This modificationof uncertainty claims often leads scientists to complain that the media coverage of risk is sensationalist

and aberrant (Dunwoody and Peters, 1992). As this paper shows, even when journalists uncriticallyreproduce scientists own uncertainty claims, scientists can construe news reports as undermining theircredibility and can respond by seeking further control over public discourse.

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A2 WE HAVE SCIENCE

The affs science conforms to a narrative structure, not vice versaFelicity Mellor 7, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Colliding Worlds:


The asteroid impact threat was thus articulated within a narrative context that was closely aligned toscience fiction and was shared by both civilian scientists and defence experts. As Veronica Hollinger(2000: 21617) has noted, traditional science fiction is driven by an Aristotelian plot characterized by avalorisation of the logic of cause and effect. Impact narratives conformed to this traditional narrative logic:asteroids and scientists act by causing a series of events to unfold, from the approach of an asteroid andrecognition of the threat through attempts at technological mitigation to resolution in salvation. Thesenarratives configured asteroids as acting agents in human affairs and brought to asteroid science astructure in which human agents (and their technological proxies) solve the problem posed in thenarrative and in so doing achieve closure. Allusions to impact narratives implied a direction and human-centredness to events that, once the narratives had been evoked, could not easily be suppressed.Despite their attempts to distance themselves from the weapons scientists, the civilian scientists

experienced a narrative imperative that drew them towards the same technologized ends as thosepromoting SDI. A sense of narrative agency was evoked even in texts that were not primarily narratival.Crucially, asteroids were no longer seen as signifiers of the mathematically exacting Newtonian system,distant objects moving through the empty backdrop of space. Rather, they were configured as proximatebeasts, acting subjects that could turn against humanity at any moment. Thus in their many popular bookson the subject, the scientists described asteroids as belonging to a menagerie or a cosmic zoo (Steel,2000a: 120); they were menacing (Kring, 2000: 171) and had teeth (Clube & Napier, 1990: 154); theywere global killers (Lewis, 1997: 209) that could unleash ferocious assaults (Steel, 1995: 247) on theEarth; they were the enemy (Steel, 2000a: 153). Likewise, in their paper in Nature, Chapman &Morrison (1994: 33) stated that Earth resides in a swarm of asteroids. The construction of asteroids asthe enemy was accompanied by a range of other militaristic metaphors. In the popular books, asteroidsbecame missiles, pieces of ordnance or stealth weapons (Lewis, 1997: 37), which bombard the Earthwith a death-dealing fusillade (Clube & Napier, 1990: 7). In a technical paper, too, they were construed

as astral assailant[s] (Simonenko et al., 1994: 929). Where the military and the politicians talked of roguestates,27 the scientists talked of rogue asteroids (Steel, 1995; Ailor, 2004: 3). This analogy was furtherreinforced by the construction of scenarios in which a small impact might be mistaken for the detonationof a nuclear warhead. One technical paper speculated on what would have happened during the first GulfWar if an atmospheric explosion that had been caused by a meteor burning up over the Pacific hadactually occurred over Baghdad or Israel (Tagliaferri et al., 1994). The authors suggested that such anevent would have been mistaken for a missile detonation by the opposing state. In such scenarios, theactions of interplanetary bodies were not just compared with those of rogue states but came to beidentified with them. With the swarming asteroids fill ing space, space itself was also resignified. What hadbeen an abstract mathematical space became a narrative place, the location where particular andcontingent events occurred. Although the scientists continued to appeal to the predictability of celestialdynamics it was this that would enable a survey of near-Earth objects to identify any that might pose athreat they also noted that chaotic processes disturbed the orbits of comets and also, to a lesser

degree, asteroids (for example, Yeomans & Chodas, 1994; Milani et al., 2000). The inherentunpredictability of the orbits was enhanced by the current state of scientific uncertainty. These chaoticand uncertain processes were projected onto space itself, construed as a place of random violence. In thepopular books, the Solar System became a dangerous cosmic neighbourhood (Sumners & Allen, 2000b:3), a capricious, violent place (Verschuur, 1996: 217), a place of mindless violence (Verschuur, 1996:18) and wanton destruction (Levy, 1998: 13). Even in a peer-reviewed paper, Chapman (2004: 1)described space as a cosmic shooting gallery. Despite the agency attributed to the asteroidsthemselves, in the narratives of technological salvation it was the human agents, acting through newtechnologies, who moved the narratives forward. Narrative progression was thus generated through anassumption of technological progress. Through technology, humans intervene in space and becomeagents of cosmic events. The scientists promotion of the impact threat shared this assumption oftechnological progress. Like the US Air Force study, their technical papers on mitigation systemsconsidered speculative technologies such as solar sails and mass drivers as well as more established

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explosive technologies (for example, Ahrens & Harris, 1992; Melosh & Nemchinov, 1993; Ivashkin &Smirnov, 1995; Gritzner & Kahle, 2004). Even those scientists who warned that it was too early to drawup detailed blueprints of interception technologies accepted the narratival implication that there was aproblem that needed addressing, that the problem could be addressed by human action, and that thisaction would involve a technological solution. Technology, in this picture, was configured as inherently

progressive. As Morrison & Teller (1994: 1137) put it: The development of technology in the past fewcenturies has been towards increasing understanding and control of natural forces in an effort to improvehuman life. Those scientists who argued against the immediate development of mitigation technologyshared with its proponents a belief in the inexorable progress of technology. Future generations, theyargued, would be better equipped than we are at the moment to meet the technological challenge of animpacting asteroid (for example, Ahrens & Harris, 1992).

And, their best studies cite science fiction novelsFelicity Mellor 7, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Colliding Worlds:


Despite their disagreements over technical details and funding priorities, both civilian and defence

scientists appealed to narratives of technological salvation. In his study of the superweapon in theAmerican imagination, Bruce Franklin (1988) has shown how a century-long tradition of futurewar fictionshaped an apocalyptic ideology in which American technological genius was to put an end to all war andfulfill Americas manifest destiny. Franklin argues that this cultural fantasizing has been materiallysignificant in producing actual superweapons and developing defence policy. As David Seed (1999) hasalso shown, SDI was made imaginable, and was explicitly defended, by science fiction writers. Theimpact-threat scientists took this cultural fantasizing a step further as they attempted to establish thereality of that threat. It was now nature, rather than any human foe, which was configured as the warringenemy whose technological defeat would bring Earthly harmony. Until the 1970s, most science fictionstories about asteroids imagined them as objects to be exploited for their mineral wealth.24 Scientistswritings would occasionally reflect this interest.25 Indeed, the only paper in the 1979 volume Asteroids toallude to a future impact of an asteroid with Earth was framed in terms of the exploitation of asteroids. In abizarre paper, which had been rejected for an earlier publication after being judged outrageously

innovative and premature, Samuel Herrick (1979) proposed that portions of the asteroid Geographoscould be targeted at specific points on the Earth to produce constructive effects, such as the excavationof a new Central American canal to join the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. However, by the time of Herrickstechnical fantasy, science fiction writers had begun to explore the more destructive consequences of anasteroid impacting with Earth. Most notably, Arthur C. Clarke, in his 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama(Clarke, 1991 [1973]) described an asteroid impact in 2077. A detection survey called Spaceguard isestablished in response to the impact and the rest of the story deals with the investigation of what actuallyturns out to be an alien spacecraft that is detected by the Spaceguard survey some 60 years later. Clarkedeveloped the Spaceguard idea further in another novel, Hammer of God (Clarke, 1995) [1993] afterwriting a short story on the same theme for Time magazine the previous year (Clarke, 1992b). Clarkesimpact novels were well regarded by the scientists promoting the impact threat and were cited in some oftheir peer-reviewed papers and policy documents as well as in their popular books. For instance, in theirinfluential paper in Nature, Chapman & Morrison (1994: 38) introduced the idea of deflecting a possibleimpactor with a reference to Hammer of God, noting that: Just such a scenario is the theme of arecent novel (see also Morrison et al., 1994: 84; Atkinson, 2000: 36). Indeed, the scientists named theirown international survey the Spaceguard Survey and their promotional organization the SpaceguardFoundation in tribute to Clarke, as they acknowledged in their technical papers (for example, Milani et al.,2002: 55). Clarke became a Trustee Member of Spaceguard, and he was a personal friend of DuncanSteel and Tom Gehrels, and wrote the foreword for one of Steels popular books on the impact threat andthe afterword for another one (Gehrels, 1988: 236; Steel, 1995, 2000a). As Clarke himself remarked inthe acknowledgements for one of his novels, the strands of fact and fiction are becoming inextricablyentwined (Clarke, 1995 [1993]: 247). Also mentioned by the scientists was Larry Niven and JerryPournelles Lucifers Hammer. This 1977 novel is essentially a survivalist tale about the aftermath of acomet impact. In the lawless devastation following the impact, a former Senator sets up a community thatattempts to re-establish a civilized, technologized society. This predominantly white community isattacked by various predominantly violent black gangs, one of which has turned to cannibalism as an

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initiation rite. Despite its racism, which always went unacknowledged in the scientists comments, theypraised this novel in their popular books. For instance, planetary scientist John Lewis (1997: 151) statedthat no novel had better visualized the effects of ocean impacts, and Steel cited it as an example of goodscience fiction based on real science (Steel, 2000a: 124). Acknowledging limits to the expertise ofnatural scientists, Clark Chapman and David Morrison (1989: 279) suggested that estimating sociological

responses to catastrophe are more nearly in the purview of sciencefiction writers, like Jerry Pournelle andLarry Niven, who addressed these matters in Lucifers Hammer (see also Morrison et al., 2004: 378). LikeClarke, Niven had direct contact with the scientists promoting the impact threat, attending the 2004Planetary Defense Conference in California. Despite their very different political affinities, Clarke, Nivenand Pournelle all portrayed technology as a force for good. With his proposal for a Spaceguard survey inRendezvous with Rama and with the action of Hammer of God based on board a research space vesselcharged with deflecting the incoming asteroid, Clarkes impact novels promoted salvation throughtechnology. Despite his earlier criticisms of SDI, in 1992 Clarke gave two faint cheers for Son-of-SDI,given certain provisos, because the technology might be needed to deflect an asteroid (Clarke, 1992a:12). Niven and Pournelle also promoted an ideology of technological salvation in their novel, despitesetting Lucifers Hammer in the technologically compromised aftermath of an impact. The storysdenouement has the Senators group defending a nuclear power station, which they see as offering themeans to recover civilization a civilization fully attainable only through its technological artefacts. In this,as in other impact narratives, technology offers not the source of destruction but the means of salvation.

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A2 COLLISION = STATISTICALLY INEVITABLE

Asteroids predictions get hopelessly distorted when assessed numericallyFelicity Mellor 10, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Negotiating

uncertainty: asteroids, risk and the media, Public Understand. Sci. 19(1) (2010) 1633Most studies of the construction of uncertainty in public science have focused on policy contexts. Theasteroid impact threat offers an example of how scientists can actively construct risk and publicly managethe uncertainties in their knowledge even in a field not clearly positioned within a policy context. Indeed,the promotion of asteroids as risky objects can be seen as part of a strategy to secure increased fundingby transforming asteroid research into a public policy concern. Shackley and Wynne (1996) have arguedthat uncertainty claims function as boundary ordering devices which can stabilize and maintain theboundary between scientists and policymakers at the same time as enabling interactions across theboundary. The absence of a prior public policy context for asteroid research meant that the uncertaintyclaims of the NEO scientists were often addressed, through the news media, to a wider public audience.In this context, the differing interests of the scientists (to establish their authority and gain public support)and the journalists (to entertain their audiences with newsworthy stories) meant that uncertainty claimsfailed to function successfully as boundary-ordering devices. However, in devising new hazard scales and

communication protocols, the scientists persisted in their expectation that the quantification of uncertaintywould serve their interests by controlling public discourse. As in policy-based studies of scientificuncertainty, authority emerges as a key feature of the negotiation of the uncertainties of asteroid impacts.The NEO scientists attempted to position themselves as authoritative purveyors of knowledge bytransforming non-knowing (indeterminacies in orbit predictions and asteroid properties, unknown socialfactors, etc.) into quantitative assessments of uncertainty. Journalists were accepting of thistransformation. News reports often reproduced the scientists uncertainty claims uncritically, as othershave found of science reporting more generally (e.g., Nelkin, 1995). Despite their uncritical approach, the

journalists managed uncertainty in different ways than did the NEO scientists. They drew on three keydevices. Firstly, they recontextualized the scientists statistical statements through juxtaposition withscenarios of future impacts. These provided the specific events required of news reports. Although thescientists presented similar scenarios in their own popular writings (Mellor, 2007), they objected to theperceived certainty conveyed when such scenarios were attached to specific possibilities. Secondly,

journalists were able to signal uncertainty through the use of conditionals and through caveats placed lowin a story. To the scientists, such unobtrusive devices were overwhelmed by the foregrounding of possiblefuture events. Thirdly, journalists signaled uncertainty more prominently through the use of humor and thereporting of differing predictions. The scientists interpreted these as challenges to their authority andcredibility. The different representational practices used by the scientists and journalists were grounded indifferent assumptions about the public audience. As Stilgoe (2007) found, the construction of scientificauthority and credibility through uncertainty claims also entails the construction of the public. Whenrevising their representations of uncertainty, the NEO scientists repeatedly construed the public asignorant and easily scared. By contrast, the journalists use of humor implied that their readership wouldget the joke and understood that an impact was highly unlikely. The use of humor thus assumed anaudience capable of decoding ironic headlines as expressions of uncertainty. The scientists failure toacknowledge such capability on the part of the public encouraged their own (mis)reading of humor as anassault on their credibility. The question for the media coverage of risk is not so much whether reporting

emphasizes certainty or uncertainty but how precisely the dynamic between the two is handled (cf.Stocking, 1999). The asteroid impact threat reveals the complexities of this dynamic, in terms of both therepeated work scientists put into controlling the public representation of uncertainty, and the layeredmeans through which journalists are able to denote both certainty and uncertainty simultaneously.Friedman et al. (1996) have suggested that responsible journalism about risk issues should include thereporting of risk statistics and risk comparisons. The analysis presented here shows that even if

journalists do faithfully report such figures, scientists continue to complain about the media coverage.More importantly, the flawed nature of many of the scientists numerical assessments shows that suchreporting fails to provide the critical questioning one might reasonably expect of responsible journalism.This suggests that the framing of issues as amenable to quantitative risk assessments can itself beproblematic. This study shows that certainty and uncertainty are inextricably interwoven. Theircoproduction is accomplished in different ways by different discursive communities. Scientists usequantitative assessments, even those which are technically inappropriate, to replace uncertainty with

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certainty about uncertainty (Shackley andWynne, 1996: 281, emphasis in original). Such assessmentscan be developed as overt communication strategies aimed at controlling public discourse in order toassert the scientists authority and promote the significance of their specialism. Journalists reproduce andrecontextualize these assessments, reinforcing their certainty even at the same time as they signal theirspeculative and uncertain nature through devices such as humor and balance. Scientists responses to

these journalistic devices, however, can draw on assumptions about the media audience which, far fromresolving the perceived problem, further entrench the discursive gap between the two communities.

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A2 WE HAVE STUDIES

The affs research is tainted by defense imperativesFelicity Mellor 7, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Colliding Worlds:


Because narratives are shared within a research community, they are not always explicitly articulated intexts. Technical papers are most likely to hide the fundamental assumptions that underpin a researcharea. However, literature addressed to wider audiences is often more explicit. Grey literature, such aspolicy reports or review papers, and popularizations written by scientists are therefore useful sources foridentifying the narrative context in which a science is framed, traces of which may also be found intechnical papers. While always remembering that such accounts are written with particular persuasive ormarketing goals in mind, these texts nonetheless reveal what, to the scientist-author, is both thinkableand compelling. In what follows, I draw on this full range of texts, from technical papers to popularizations,to show that the scientists promoting the impact threat have repeatedly turned to narratives oftechnological salvation that imagined the ultimate superweapon a space-based planetary defencesystem that would protect the Earth from the cosmic enemy. I begin with a brief overview of earlier

conceptions of asteroids before outlining the events through which asteroids were promoted as a threatand examining the narrative context in which this occurred. I finish by arguing that the narration of theimpact threat entailed a reconceptualization of asteroids, space and astronomy and invoked a narrativeimperative that helped legitimize the militarization of space.

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A2 WE STILL SOLVE

Solve what? the supposed asteroid hurtling toward earth was made up in thefirst place

Even the military acknowledges that anti-asteroid tech is science fictionFelicity Mellor 7, Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, Colliding Worlds:


Like the civilian scientists, the US defence scientists interested in the impact threat also worked in acommunity influenced by science fiction. Indeed, in some sectors of the military planning community,including those in which the promoters of SDI moved, explicit links with science fiction authors werecultivated regularly. As Chris Hables Gray (1994) has noted, militaristic science fiction and military policycoexist in the same discourse system to a surprising degree (see also Franklin, 1988; James, 1994: 200).The Air Force Academy held annual Nexus conferences on science fiction and military policy, and otherconferences, such as the Futurist conferences, also brought together military policy-makers and science

fiction authors. At one typical conference held in 1985 at Ohio Air Force base, the authors presentincluded prominent proponents of SDI such as Jerry Pournelle (Seed, 1999: 192). Pournelle was directorof organizational support for the Heritage Foundations High Frontier project, which campaigned for SDI,and he was chair of a panel that in 1984 had published the pro-SDI tract, Mutually Assured Survival(Gray, 1994). He was also, for many years, the editor of the annual anthology series There Will Be War!,which mixed pro-war science fiction stories with pro-SDI non-fiction to claim that war was inevitable. Thescientists promoting and working on SDI weapons were avid consumers of science f iction and some haddirect links to science fiction authors. Rod Hyde, one of the Lawrence Livermore scientists who studiedthe impact threat, belonged to the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, an organizationfounded by Pournelle (Broad, 1985: 141). Another Lawrence Livermore scientist included references toworks by Pournelle, Niven and other science fiction authors in his doctoral thesis on the X-ray laser. In aninterview with journalist William Broad, he explained that he turned to such authors for ideas about hisown work. Writers of science fiction are supposed to look into the future. So I started looking to see whatthey had in mind for the X-ray lasers (Broad, 1985: 120). Such links were part of a broader futuresplanning culture within the military that relied heavily on fictional constructs. Gray (1994) argues thatstandard military practices, such as war-gaming and scenario construction, are works of military fictionand that this fiction-making is both directly and indirectly influenced by the ideas of pro-war science fictionauthors. The 1996 US Air Force study into the asteroid impact threat is an example of such fiction-making. The study was part of a futures planning exercise that considered several possible alternatefutures for the year 2025, drawing on a concepts database that included such science-fictional ideas asforce shields and gravity manipulation. The authors of the study noted the science fiction provenance ofthese ideas, at one point referring directly to Star Trek, but they took the ideas seriously nonetheless.They noted, with some understatement, that gravity manipulation was an undeveloped technology, butmade no such comment about other speculative technologies such as solar sails, mass drivers orbiological eaters, which were supposed to munch their way through the threatening comet or asteroid(Urias, 1996: 4154).

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***AFF ANSWERS

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EPISTEMOLOGY NOT 1ST

Overemphasis on method destroys effective IR scholarshipWendt 2, international security studies at Ohio State, Handbook of IR, p. 68

It should be stressed that in advocating a pragmatic view we are not endorsing method-driven socialscience. Too much research in international relations chooses problems or things to be explained with aview to whether the analysis will provide support for one or another methodological ism. But the point ofIR scholarship should be to answer questions about international politics that are of great normativeconcern, not to validate methods. Methods are means, not ends in themselves.As a matter ofpersonal scholarly choice it may be reasonable to stick with one method and see how far it takes us. Butsince we do not know how far that is, if the goal of the discipline is insight into world politics then it makeslittle sense to rule out one or the other approach on a priori grounds. In that case a method indeedbecomes a tacit ontology, which may lead to neglect of whatever problems it is poorly suited toaddress. Being conscious about these choices is why it is important to distinguish between theontological, empirical and pragmatic levels of the rationalist-constructivist debate. We favor the pragmaticapproach on heuristic grounds, but we certainly believe a conversation should continue on all three levels.

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REPS DONT MATTER

Discourse doesnt shape policymakingTuathail 96(Gearid, Professor of Government and International Affairs, Virginia Tech, The patterned

mess of history and the writing of critical geopolitics: a reply to Dalby, Political Geography 15:6/7, p 661-5)While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the discourse and concerns offoreign-policy decisionmakers are quite different, so different that they constitute a distinctive problemsolving, theory-averse,policy-making subculture. There is a danger that academics assume that the discourses they engage are moresignificant in the practice of foreign policy and the exercise of power than they really are. This is not, however, to minimize the obvious importanceof academia as a general institutional structure among many that sustain certain epistemic communities in particular states. In general, I do notdisagree with Dalbys fourth point about politics and discourse except to note that his statement-Precisely because reality could be represented inparticular ways political decisions could be taken, troops and material moved and war fought-evades the important question of agency that I noted in

my review essay. The assumption that it is representations that make action possible is inadequate by itself. Political,military and economic structures, institutions, discursive networks and leadership are all crucial in explaining social action and shouldbe theorized together with representational practices. Both here and earlier, Dalbys reasoning inclines towards a form of idealism. In response toDalbys fifth point (with its three subpoints), it is worth noting, first, that his book is about the CPD, not the Reagan administration. He analyzes certainCPD discourses, root the geographical reasoning practices of the Reagan administration nor its public-policy reasoning on national security. Dalbysbook is narrowly textual; the general contextuality of the Reagan administration is not dealt with. Second, let me simply note that I find that thedistinction between critical theorists and poststructuralists is a little too rigidly and heroically drawn by Dalby and others. Third, Dalbys interpretation of

the reconceptualization of national security in Moscow as heavily influenced by dissident peace researchers in Europe is highly idealist, aninterpretation that ignores the structural and ideological crises facing the Soviet elite at that time. Gorbachevs reforms and his new security discoursewere also strongly selfinterested, an ultimately futile attempt to save the Communist Party and a discredited regime of power from disintegration. Theissues raised by Simon Dalby in his comment are important ones for all those interested in the practice of critical geopolitics. While I agree with Dalby

that questions of discourse are extremely important ones for political geographers to engage, there is a danger offetishizing this concern withdiscourse so that we neglect the institutional and the sociological, the materialist and the cultural, the political and thegeographical contexts within which particulardiscursive strategies become significant. Critical geopolitics, in otherwords, should not be a prisoner of the sweeping ahistorical cant that sometimes accompanies poststructuralism nor convenient reading strategies likethe identity politics narrative; it needs to always be open to the patterned mess that is human history.

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ASTEROIDS ARE ACTUALLY COMING

The asteroid threat isnt a narrative there is a rock, it is coming, and we canactually stop it

Russell L. Schweickart 9, former Apollo astronaut and chairman of the B612 Foundation, Decisionprogram on asteroid threat mitigation, Acta Astronautica 65 (2009) 14021408

Our highly interconnected society is vulnerable to the destructive power of impact events ranging from the1908 Tunguska event in which the impact of an estimated 45 m diameter object destroyed 2000 km- ofSiberian forest to the 12 km diameter object responsible for the Chicxulub impact 65 million years agowhich is thought to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and 70C< of all species alive at the time.Such cosmic collisions occur infrequently juxtaposed with a human lifetime, and yet wh